


dark was the night (cold was the ground)

by mysweetadeline



Category: The Haunting of Hill House (TV 2018)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-21 21:35:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16584626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysweetadeline/pseuds/mysweetadeline
Summary: Where Hugh can’t tell the difference between fixing and breaking, Steve denies the truth until he loses everyone, and Nell looks for a ghost until she becomes the same.





	dark was the night (cold was the ground)

**Author's Note:**

> Listen this show is fucking amazing and you need to watch it right now.
> 
> These are my top three characters (don't hate that i love Steve he is my misunderstood bean). 
> 
>  
> 
> Title: Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground by Blind Willie Johnson.

~

 

Hugh:

 

When it was summer, back when he was a boy and the trees grew tall and green on his father’s farm, Hugh wanted to build.

 

Anything really, a henhouse here, a wagon there, a new chair to replace the one father broke, he _loved_ it. Loved the way the pieces would end up fitting together just right, just so perfectly.

 

He married Olivia for the same reason, because they were really just two puzzle pieces that found each other, balancing in perfect cohesion.

 

It was really the satisfaction at the end that makes building things worth it. To know that the effort he made amounted to an intended result.

 

That’s the reason, he would reflect in the years to come, the reason he bought Hill House to begin with. It was an insurmountable project, but Hugh knew there had to be a perfect way for him to fix it. Because the house is a thing, and things, unlike people, are able to be fixed.

 

“I can fix it”, he smiles to his wife’s doubt and his children’s skepticism, and his voice echoes in its certainty.

 

(he also questions, in the years to come, just how he could be so wrong)

 

The walls start deteriorating and the pipes are bursting and there’s a scr-scr-scratching coming from the other side when there aren’t any rats at all.

 

His wife, his beautiful, loving wife draws up a map of a lunatic’s making and when he meets her eyes, when he sees her, he is terrified to find her not there at all.

 

“I can fix it”, his voice shakes in all its desperation, and this time, he really means _I can fix you._

 

He knows he has crossed the silver lining because a person, a living being is far more complex to fix than a thing, but Hugh needs to try.

 

 _Hugh the mechanic_ his father would say, clapping him on the shoulder and his mother would flinch and he would smile, _I can fix it,_ he remembers oh how he used to smile.

 

But he supposes, in the end, that the house fixed him. From the moment he opens the gates for the first time to when he walks through the unfixable red door and lets it swallow him whole.

 

He supposes, not all things allow themselves to be fixed.

  
~

 

Steve:

 

There was a time, a time that seems far too far away now, but a time when he thought he could protect them.

 

His father, his smart, kind father who always had the permanent look of absolute concentration on his face. “Can I help?” Steve would ask because he’s the oldest and he wants to be just like his father.

 

His mother, her radiant smile and soft words. She would tell him stories and tales and oh how Steve would laugh, “tell me another”, he would say and her melodic voice would raise in tone again.

 

His brother, his quiet demeanor often worried Steve. Luke, always holed up in that remote treehouse. Luke, who just wanted a friend.

 

His sisters, his darling sisters. He and Shirley get along easily, them being the oldest and all. Theo and him never properly connected, but they still talked. And Nelly, sweet little Nelly who needs Big Brother Steve the most out of them all.

 

But there’s something wrong with them. All of them, and Steve can’t seem to figure it out.

 

His father’s eyes twitch, Shirley’s voice shakes, his mother punches the mirror as if she sees a - , Theo screams, Luke draws monsters in the trees, and Nelly talks of a ghost who only she can see.

 

He thought once that he could protect them, but they tell him these stories of made-up things and Steve doesn’t know how to help anymore.

 

Money is scarce, and his wife’s impatient so he writes them down, the haunted stories of Hill House.

 

It’s a hit, the press loves it, soaking up all the crazy and publishing it with big tabloids.

 

OLDEST CRAIN SIBLING BREAKS SILENCE

 

CRAIN FAMILY, HAUNTED OR DELUSIONAL

 

GHOSTS IN HILL HOUSE?

 

Steve winces at some of the language the media uses, but at the end of the day, it’s okay, he thinks, because none of it’s real to begin with.

 

“Blood money”, Shirley had called it, her eyes sunken in with disappointment and Steve had brushed it off, maybe they are right about _delusion_.

 

It’s Nell who shows up to one of his book signings, and Steve is hopeful only to find her still dripping with hatred. He blocks her out, because she is wrong goddammit, because they’re all wrong, there’s something wrong with them all.

 

“You’re the best older brother ever!” Nelly told him this once confidently, and Steve wonders where it all came crashing down.

 

The book was the obvious answer, of course, that’s when they all stopped trusting him, but Steve knows, he _knows_ the truth.

 

(the house, it all goes back to that damned house).

 

It’s far too late by the time he realizes that all of it was real, and Steve,

 

Steve realizes that he couldn’t have protected them in the first place.

  
~

 

Nell:

 

Wherever she went, there was always something waiting in the darkness. It started when they moved to Hill House, but it didn’t end when she left.

 

It started creeping in from the shadows until it got so starkly obvious that Nell can’t ignore it.

 

“It was - it was a bent neck lady”, Nelly told her parents the first night when she saw it at her bedside, and they had chuckled of course, as parent do, and told her it was just a nightmare.

 

 _A nightmare_ , Nelly had scoffed at first but then she meets Arthur, who steps into her life like the morning sun. It really is kinda like a nightmare, he tells her, and he makes her better.

 

She still looks for it in the shadows at times, still feels that chill down her spine, but she stops seeing the ghost that once haunted her childhood.

 

But then Arthur dies, and everywhere she turns, the bent neck lady is there.

 

“It all goes back to Hill House,” her therapist tells her, and she knows he’s right.

 

“It’s just a house”, she tells herself this as she walks through the gates for the last time, “just a corpse”. But the second she enters, the house becomes alive, and she sees her family, her mother and Arthur, and she’s dancing, dancing, dancing away but something's missing, she can feel it weighing down her heart.

 

She looks for it. She can’t find it, but she feels it, creeping in from the shadows, so close she can almost touch it.

 

The bent neck lady never left, was always just waiting in the darkness.

 

Nelly hears her neck break and sees herself - when she was six and sleeping on the couch, when she was twenty and driving down the road, when she was paralyzed and Arthur was dead, when it was dark and all Nell could see was - , when she saw it at her bedside and screams.

 

And Nell screams back.

 

She knows now that the bent neck lady can’t have ever left, the same way one can’t ever escape their own fate.

 

Nell had gone back to the house, and laid in her grave.


End file.
